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One of the coolest projects I have been working on is how to solve issues with database versioning and migration. A project dubbed RoundhousE.

RoundhousE is an open source automated database deployment (change management) system that allows you to use your current idioms and gain much more. Currently it only supports Microsoft SQL Server, but there are future plans for other databases.

It seeks to solve both maintenance concerns and ease of deployment. We follow some of the same idioms as other database management systems (SQL scripts), but we are different in that we think about future maintenance concerns. We want to always apply certain scripts (anything stateless like functions, views, stored procedures, and permissions), so we don’t have to throw everything into our change scripts. This seeks to solves future source control concerns. How sweet is it when you can version the database according to your current source control version?

RoundhousE (RH) is a very lean implementation for database migration that uses SQL Scripts to apply changes to a database. It is extremely configurable in that you can override the conventions for everything, including the schema, version table, and scripts run table for RH. RoundhousE is implemented as an MSBuild/NAnt Task, a console application (the console is still in development), and in the future possibly a GUI as well. There is an extensive roadmap on the product. Over the next few weeks I will be talking about how to set up and use this product and future enhancements.

Until then, enjoy this image of Chuck showing off his intimate knowledge of open source!